Amok: An Anthology of Asia-Pacific Speculative Fiction (34 page)

“
Amatsukami
protect us.” Tanuki gasped in awe.

“There are no
kami
here.” Onigawara growled and swung his sword in warning before the demon. “Go back whence you came. You’ll take no bones from here.”

“
Bones…
” it rasped. “
Give… me… bones
.” Crossing the alley swiftly on long legs, the demon grasped the wall with both skeletal hands and heaved itself up as if no opposition stood in its way.

“Away!” screeched Tanuki. “This is our house. Away with you!” He lifted his walking stick over his head and brought it down as hard as he could on an exposed collarbone. The demon didn’t seem to notice. It teetered on the wall a moment and then leaned forward, stretching an arm down to the earth on the other side.

If Onigawara was perturbed at all by the
odokuro
’s indifference he didn’t show it. He swung his sword down hard on the outstretched limb and severed it from the rest of the demon in a single blow. The demon gave no sign of pain, but the loss of the limb unbalanced it, and it tipped over the wall and into the juniper, knocking Tanuki down with it.

For a brief, terrifying moment the ground rushed up at him. His long life outside the front door flashed before his eyes as he made peace with the world—Onigawara included. Then, just as suddenly as it had started, his fall was halted by a well-placed branch of juniper, which snagged in the hole in the back of his tail.

“Thank you Kentaro,” he gasped. “Your cruelty has saved me tonight.”

The
odokuro
thrashed in the tree above him, stuck temporarily in the overgrowth of needles and branches that caught in the crevices of its bone body. The tree wouldn’t hold forever though, and as the demon twisted, the branches creaked and snapped and gave way, piece by piece.

Tanuki reached for the tree trunk to free himself, but the juniper swung so violently he couldn’t get a handhold. The monster above him loomed closer. Unable to pull itself back up on one arm alone, it snapped off the branches trapping it instead, grinding them to mulch between its teeth. One misplaced bite could easily take Tanuki’s lower half with it.

Tanuki stretched himself out as far as he could, but the needles of the branch nearest to him danced just out of reach. He tried twisting his tail around but it only lodged the branch deeper in his hollow cavity. He’d about made up his mind to chance rocking back and forth when the branch he was caught on gave a sudden, violent lurch. It tipped him downward and sent him spinning the last few centimetres to the ground, where he finally came to a stop when he collided with the pile of bones sloughed off by Onigawara.

But rather than scatter lifelessly into the garden, the pile clapped and rattled as if laughing at him. Wide-eyed, Tanuki pulled himself to his feet and backed away, jostled and bumped as the scraps of demon collected together again. The bucking bones grew so lively that the ground beneath Tanuki’s feet vibrated with their drumming, and before his horrified eyes they reassembled the severed arm—as whole and complete as if it’d suffered no damage at all.

“The other hand!” Tanuki cried up to his friend, but Onigawara gave no sign that he heard.

The arm seemed to have no designs for Tanuki. It propelled itself instead on its fingers back toward the demon it belonged to.

With no time to consider the danger, Tanuki threw himself onto the tailing arm and wedged the end of his walking stick between the bones of its wrist. The tip of the stick dug deep into the ground, staking the limb to the earth and the arm—having stuck itself back together again—couldn’t disassemble away from the foreign object, nor could it lift itself high enough to free itself.

“Onigawara! The hand! The hand!” Tanuki yelled again, but the gargoyle was out of sight.

The
odokuro
howled its frustration, drowning out Tanuki’s shouts of alarm in a screaming clang of bells. Even if he could raise his voice over the cacophony, the thrashing of the limb under him made holding on a difficult enough task.

“Onigawara!”

Without warning the disembodied limb bucked up and threw Tanuki clear into the air.

Time around him seemed to slow to a crawl.

Higher than the juniper, the wall—even higher than the roof—Tanuki had never been so high in his life. The view was amazing. The bright red pillars of the shrine down the street were visible, even with the lights of the three-story shopping centre framing it from behind. In the distance there were even a few green points of light—fireflies—moving on for the season to the secret place of gods and
kami
.

How different things were when looking down, rather than up. This must be how Onigawara saw the world—stretched out before him in humbling vastness. Tanuki’s life might have been very different if he’d sat with his friend on the roof, even once. He could have, if he’d tried. He could have climbed the juniper and walked the wall. He could have—

Time snapped out of its slow motion drift. Tail-first, Tanuki slammed onto the edge of the roof and spun down through the air before shattering on the flagstone steps in front of the porch. The mournful crash of a jolly piece of pottery was swallowed up by the clacks of scattering bones as Onigawara made the final blow on the
odokuro
’s left shoulder. The demon howled but defenceless, it could do little else.

Onigawara wasted no time.

Climbing over twisting vertebrae he hooked his feet into the back of the demon’s skull and hacked away at its neck. The demon screeched and thrashed but Onigawara could not be dislodged; with a final, terrible blow, he cut the head from the
odokuro
.

A bell tolled and echoed over the wall. The skull and all its stolen bones disappeared, and Onigawara was thrown head over heels through the garden. He lost an arm at the base of the juniper, and both legs on the stones of the koi pond where inertia bounced him up and dropped him into the endless green.

§

Kentaro arrived at seven twenty-four the next morning in a crisp black suit and matching tie. Armed with a briefcase full of paperwork he faced the home of his late father and in his head drew figures and calculations and projections of the worth of the land without the antique building that sat on it.

In the garden he did the same; he took notes of the property lines and the meterage, inspected the alley behind the half collapsed eastern wall and kicked aside the broken pottery that might trip the brokers who would come to view the house.

Half of a plump
tanuki
face spun off into the weeds, its wide grin belying its pitiable state.

“This place is a death trap. I don’t know how it didn’t kill my father years ago.”

Mounting the steps to the porch, he slid open the door and trod on the tail of a cat napping in a patch of morning sunlight. It screeched and hissed but before it could escape, Kentaro had it by its nape.

“Goddamnit, Shizuho. Stop taking in strays,” he muttered and evicted it out the door.

Offended, the cat sat in front of the porch, refusing to be rushed, and passed its tongue fourteen times over its left paw and six times over its right. Its point made, it stood and followed the trail of stressed and crushed weeds to the cheerful, skyward smile of the broken
tanuki
. “That man, indeed, has no respect,” it said and swished its tail thoughtfully westward.

“Let’s go,” it said at last, and picking up the shard of pottery, it mounted the fallen juniper before disappearing over the crumbled wall.

A solitary firefly winked once in agreement and followed after it.

About NJ Magas

Born and raised in Canada, NJ Magas now lives in Kyoto, Japan with a dog, a bird, a tortoise, and her spouse. She writes when she should be sleeping, walks when she should be writing, and practices Japanese fencing when she needs something else to do. She’s not sure that she’s ever seen a ceramic tanuki come to life, but is convinced that if it’s going to happen it’ll be at the temple behind her house where she spends a lot of time observing, thinking, and coffee drinking. NJ Magas reviews the books she reads on her blog,
http://njmagas.wordpress.com
among other things. You can also follow her on Twitter @njmagas.

The King of Flotsamland

Tom Barlow

~ North Pacific Gyre~

When I heard the
butter butter butter
of a helicopter approaching from the east, I dropped the fish netting I’d been untangling and strolled over to Baggie Beach. The previous afternoon, Koo, worried, had tipped me that Midas Recycling was sending out a consultant to find out why she and her harvester crew had failed to meet their monthly production quota. Again.

I was hoping the consultant would haul her and the rest of the crew back to the mainland for their winter furlough. Once the harvester was abandoned until spring, I would be free to leave Flotsamland myself and return to San Diego. My monthly resupply flight from the Fair Share Gaea group was due on Sunday, and I could hitch a ride home with them.

The Sikorsky settled onto the deck of the cargo ship a thousand yards from my floating trash-pile kingdom. That ship was already half-full of pieces of the island, chewed away by the harvester in August, while I was incapacitated by an infected cut on my foot. Mr Pepsodent, the largest of the neighbourhood sharks that hung around hoping for a taste of Harry (I’m Harry), swam by on his way to check out the noise.

I lifted the binoculars I’d found in a month before in the hatch of a half-a-sailboat just as the helicopter door swung open. A tall, cadaverous man in safety-orange coveralls jumped to the deck. He appeared to be about my age, mid-thirties, with extremely long legs and a long face, like a wax model left in the sun. He scowled at Koo as she approached, the rest of her crew trailing several paces behind. Two of them were wheeling their sea chests, just in case.

Cadaver Man and Koo immediately started to argue, she on her tiptoes, arms crossed. Anger can ruin some women’s looks, but she was as fetching as ever. The man brushed her aside, though, and strode to the superstructure, then up the outside ladder to the bridge. Koo followed, still carping at him.

To my dismay, the Sikorsky took off again a short time later, carrying no passengers. It disappeared over the eastern horizon, taking with it at least a month of my winter vacation.

That evening I was walking the three-mile perimeter of my island nation to see what new, interesting trash had arrived courtesy of the North Pacific Gyre when Koo paddled out of the twilight. I followed as she circled the mainland to dock on the western shore, out of sight of the cargo ship.

“Passport, please,” I said as she heaved herself out of the kayak onto the dock I’d built with aluminium cans.

“Funny man,” she replied. She’d never visited the Flotsamland mainland before, except in my dreams, but she’d spent many hours talking with me from her kayak as I kept myself interposed between the harvester and the shoreline it was supposed to devour. She wasn’t the most loyal of Midas employees, thankfully.

Her skin shone like eggplant. She was taller than I’d thought, and her PFD had been concealing a curvaceous torso. Her face was cute, in a kewpie way—wide eyes, button nose, small mouth under spiky black hair.

“We need to talk,” she said.

“Come up to the office.” I pointed to my shack, perched atop Mount Détritus.

She followed me up the twenty-foot hill. We made ourselves comfortable on the cushions I’d crafted from sailcloth and kapok. “Tea?”

She nodded. I cracked open the valve of one of the dozen propane tanks liberated from an abandoned pontoon boat, lit the jerry-rigged burner, and put on the water kettle.

“Who’s the new guy?” I said.

“His name is Goodale. He claims the home office isn’t going to pull us out until the cargo hold is full.”

I fiddled with the teapot to cover my anxiety. “You can’t be serious. Do they know what the winter’s like in the North Pacific?”

She pulled off her sweater. Even a small fire heated up the shack nicely. I’d built it in the shape of a teepee. “Midas has whole cities for processing the waste we harvest from the sea,” she said. “If they run out of product, the company goes belly-up.”

The currents of the north Pacific circulate clockwise, aided by the prevailing winds, and the trash from surrounding shorelines is pushed toward my island as surely as water is drawn to the drain. It was at the centre of this gyre that Flotsamland had taken form over the last century, a solid disc of trash a mile wide and 100 feet thick. My little pied-á-terre represented a goldmine for a company such as Midas, and they loathed Fair Share Gaea for claiming its riches should be shared with the world’s poor.

“Midas has already taken, what, eight-hundred million tons of trash out of the ocean in this area?” I said. “Why don’t they look somewhere else? I hear the Marshall Islands are nice and trashy.”

The kettle boiled, and I poured the water onto the tea leaves. The smell of bergamot from the Earl Grey was lost on me. When you live on an island made of trash, you learn to block out your sense of smell.

“Stupid question,” she said. “The better question is, what will they do to keep their big machines fed?”

“You think I could be in danger?” I handed her tea in my favourite cup, with the logo of the cruise ship,
Bacchanalia
.

“The first thing Goodale asked me was when we could expect the next day with good cloud cover and calm seas.”

A CNN satellite had been watching Flotsamland since Fair Share Gaea landed me here in a PR stunt that culminated in the pending UN resolution to declare it a shared world resource. My job was to play chicken with the harvester by keeping my kayak, the
FLS Scumbucket
, interposed between the island and the harvester whenever the weather was calm enough for harvesting. Two years of playing dodge ’em had convinced me that the company was unwilling to risk public condemnation by harming me in front of the cameras.